A 13:34 06/01/98 -0500, John Cowan a écrit :
>I am responding to all recipients mentioned in the text, as well as the
>Unicode and ISO 15924 mailing lists. Apologies to those who get this
>message more than once.
>
>Alain LaBonté wrote:
>
>> Did
>> anybody ever complain about using phone numbers or catalog numbers to order
>> goods?
>
>Everyone who has ever made or received a phone call to the wrong number,
>or who has received the wrong product, has implicitly recognized the
>problems associated with meaningless codes. See my peroration at the end.

[Alain] :
And everybody who experienced a mis-search in a database because he did not
spell-out exactly believes even more that it is because the information
does not exist! The argument about mistakes is not very strong. And the
mnemonicity is not very valid either, if it is mnemonic only in rare cases.
Look at names of mathematical symbols, even mathematicians have trouble...
if they see the glyph that's something else. Names are mnemonic only for
initiated people.

If telephone numbers were so bad or catalog numbers too, we would not them
numbers any longer (;

If I order an item in French, the catalog number will be useful if the
provider only speaks Chinese. Sae thing for telephone numbers. Names like
"John Smith" in English-speaking countries (or "Jean Dupont" in France or
"Michel Tremblay" in Canada), are but noise for retrieval.